Renée Ranchan/ The Buffet Box

The other morning, after an escalating heartbreak brought on by a piece of news that I had not remotely ordered, my cousin Saasha dragged me to a Tarot-Card reader. It was not a romantic heartbreak, so let us put the violins away. I am married, perfectly content, and have no desire to discover whether some mysterious man is about to gallop into my life on a white horse. At this juncture in life, I would be more interested in whether the horse comes with a driver. This particular heartbreak had to do with life doing what life does best: throwing a spanner into the works just when you have finally managed to locate the instruction manual. 

I had been brooding, overthinking and generally behaving as though the sky had fallen in, when Saasha decided that what I needed was not sympathy, sensible conversation or a stiff drink, but 78 cards and a woman who could apparently read my destiny from them. When a cousin arrives with a solution, resistance is usually futile. So I went. The Tarot Reader had a table, a pack of cards and the solemn expression of someone who had been entrusted with the mysteries of the universe and was not about to give them away for free. The cards were spread across the table like a little fan of secrets. There were swords, cups, wands and pentacles; kings and queens, lovers and fools, moons and towers, and assorted figures looking as though they had wandered in from a medieval nightmare. One gentleman was hanging upside down. I thought this was rather ambitious. I looked at Saasha. She looked back at me. Neither of us laughed. We were taking this seriously. Well, sort of.

Tarot itself has a perfectly respectable beginning. The cards first appeared in fifteenth century Italy, where the well-heeled used them for playing games. It was only much later, in eighteenth-century France, that somebody decided these innocent looking cards had mystical credentials and could peer into the future, as though each came with its own crystal ball… What intrigues me is not so much the cards as the clientele. Perfectly rational people, who would not dream of believing a word uttered by a roadside fortune-teller, will readily sit before a Tarot Consultant and ask whether the future has anything up its sleeve. I have watched otherwise sensible people become as attentive as a cat watching a bird when a Tarot Practitioner turns over a card. There is an immediate hush, a leaning forward, an intake of breath. Suddenly every piece of cardboard has acquired the gravity of a Supreme Court judgment.

I was no different. I wanted to know. That was the embarrassing bit... The Specialist turned over one card after another, nodding gravely at intervals, as though she were being handed the minutes of a Cabinet meeting. “You have a major change coming,” she announced. Well, don’t we all?! I nearly asked whether the deck could be a little more specific.
A major change could mean anything from a new chapter in one’s life to discovering that the plumber has actually arrived when he said he would. The latter, in my experience, would qualify as a miracle of biblical proportions. That is the beauty of predictions. They are gloriously elastic. A journey could mean a flight to London, a drive to Jaipur or a trip to the dentist. A new beginning could be a new book, a new house, a new job, a new hairstyle or, if nothing else, the purchase of a pressure cooker.

Then there is the ominous card. The Tower. Nobody wants ``The Tower’’. This depicts a tower being struck by lightning, with people tumbling out of it in various stages of catastrophe. It is hardly the picture one hopes to see after asking, “What does the month ahead look like?”

The Death card, too, has a high level capacity to raise the blood pressure. Fortunately, in Tarot, Death does not necessarily mean death. It is usually interpreted as transformation, endings and beginnings, the closing of one chapter and the opening of another. Which is rather convenient. If it actually predicted death, I suspect the Tarot-reading profession would have a considerably smaller clientele. Still, sitting there, I began to understand the seduction of it all. When you are bruised by life, you become surprisingly willing to clutch at straws. You examine tea leaves, the shape of a cloud, the timing of a WhatsApp message and the precise number of minutes somebody took to reply. You become a detective without a crime, a bloodhound without a scent. Every scrap of information begins to look like a clue.

The human mind is a funny old beast. Give it a question mark and it will chew on it all night. Perhaps that is where Tarot comes in. Not necessarily to tell us whether we shall fall in love, fall out of love or, God forbid, fall into The Tower, but to give uncertainty a shape. Life is full of riddles that refuse to resolve themselves. Will I be alright? Will this work out? Should I stay or go? Will the money arrive? Will the house ever be painted without somebody drilling through the wrong wall?

The questions change. The itch remains. Some consult astrologers. Some read palms. Some throw coins. Some consult numerology. Some pray. Others Google their symptoms at two in the morning and are convinced they have three days to live. I have no idea which method is the least alarming. At least, the Tarot Expert gives ``the maybe’’ a little theatre. The symbols are laid out. The face becomes solemn. A sword appears. A moon shows up. Somebody gasps. Suddenly your perfectly ordinary Sunday has acquired a plot. And perhaps we need that. The human heart is an excitable animal. It wants certainty where none exists. It wants guarantees in a world that deals almost exclusively in fine-print. We want advance notice. We want the script before the curtain rises. We would quite like life to come with subtitles. It doesn’t. 

That, perhaps, is why the Tarot Interpreter has such a compelling job. She cannot actually tell you what will happen, but she can make you sit still long enough to consider what you hope will happen... The cards become a kind of Rorschach test with better costumes. You see what you are ready to see. And perhaps that is why people return...Not because the cards have whispered the secrets of the universe, but because, for half an hour, somebody has listened to theirs... After all, when we are rattled, disappointed or nursing a private little upheaval, we are not always looking for prophecy. Sometimes we want reassurance dressed up as revelation. Saasha seemed delighted with the proceedings. I remained somewhere between scepticism and amusement, which is generally where I prefer to live. I left without being struck by lightning, swallowed by The Tower or delivered into the arms of some imaginary romantic interest.

My marriage remained exactly where I had left it, intact, thank you very much. What I did take away was something rather less mystical. Perhaps the cards do not tell us what is going to happen. Perhaps they merely persuade us to look at what is already happening. And if that sounds suspiciously like common sense, well, there is no shortage of people willing to put common sense in a velvet pouch, shuffle it 78 times and charge you for the privilege.

I am quite prepared to entertain the possibility that the cosmos has a sense of humour, but I draw the line at allowing a card depicting a man falling out of a burning tower to dictate my weekend. There are already enough people in my life doing that.
(Dr Renée Ranchan writes on socio-psychological issues, quasi-political matters and concerns that touch us all…)